African Americans
African Americans occupied a noteworthy place in German American relations throughout the twentieth century. For African Americans, Germany could serve as an analogue or counterpoint to white American society as they fought pervasive racial discrimination in the United States.
Germans could also use developments in African American history to comment on German concerns, but they more frequently articulated critiques (racist or antiracist) of the United States based on the position of African Americans in American society.Consideration of African Americans in Germany can appropriately begin with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who pursued graduate study of social science at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin from 1892 to 1894. Du Bois’s thought shows influences from his studies in Germany and reading of German writers. More fundamentally, Du Bois’s time in Germany and Europe provided him with a broader perspective on American society and the question of race. His Autobiography describes his feelings of liberation from American racism and parochialism, although Du Bois at times confronted racial prejudice in Germany.
African Americans have sometimes significantly shaped German views of the United States and American culture, especially American music. From the 1920s through at least the 1950s Germans typically regarded jazz as both fundamentally black and quintessentially American music, a discomfiting assessment for white and black American opponents of jazz. During the short life of the Weimar Republic, numerous African American entertainers, including most famously Josephine Baker, performed in Germany. A minority of German listeners enthusiastically greeted African American music as a tonic for European culture, which they regarded as increasingly sterile. Ernst Krenek’s successful 1927 opera, Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up), whose title character was an African American, exemplified that kind of reading of black music, which would find echoes in the eagerness of postwar German youth for jazz and rock ’n’ roll.
Conservative Germans, however, derided jazz. Racist critiques of jazz typically argued that the musical export revealed the essence of uncultured America. Nazi rhetoric decried the threatened “negrification” of German culture, and the printed guide for the Nazis’ 1938 “Degenerate Music” exhibit carried an apelike caricature of a saxophonist.Nazi antipathy toward jazz represented but one aspect of the movement’s thoroughgoing antiblack racism. African Americans appeared as the object of National Socialist racial scorn. Nazi Party organs commented approvingly on white supremacist practices like lynching and segregation in the American South. Jesse Owens’s victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the boxing matches between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling acquired their special charge in both the German and American public imaginations because they publicly refuted Nazism’s insistence on the biological inferiority of African Americans.
The establishment of the expressly racist Nazi regime under Hitler had far- reaching consequences for the struggles of African Americans for civil rights in the United States. White and black Americans recognized that racism, both antisemitic and antiblack, was a central tenet of Nazism. As the Third Reich carried the logic of racist dogma to its genocidal conclusion, racism generally came under increasing attack. American civil rights rhetoric thus analogized segregationist policies in the United States to Nazi measures against the Jews. During World War II, African American leaders linked American racism to Nazism in calling for a “double victory” against fascism abroad and racism
Spurred by the crowd's cries of “go, go, go ” the Lionel Hampton band, and especially its “King” Lionel, played themselves into a sweat for the entertainment of the jazz-hungry audience, Frankfurt, Germany, 1946. (Bettmann/Corbis)
at home.
In the 1940s and into the 1950s, the example of Nazi racism served to buttress the critique of racial segregation in the American South.African Americans had been present in Germany since 1945 as members of the U.S. armed forces stationed there. First arriving as part of a segregated army charged with democratizing the Germans, black GIs comprised just below 10 percent of the U.S. forces through the years of the military occupation. The interactions between African American soldiers and the local population produced some conflict, as well as friendships, romantic attachments, and a number of marriages between Germans and African Americans. Relationships between German women and African American soldiers aroused considerable concern among Germans and white Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. During the 1950s, West Germans publicly debated how to integrate children of African American and German parents into West German society as Germans began to consider in a new way ideas about race and Germanness.
In Germany, a tradition of criticizing American racial discrimination against African Americans and of forging a sympathetic affiliation with African Americans continued from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. In the interwar years, German Communists protested as unjust the rape convictions of the celebrated
African American “Scottsboro Boys.” In a more attenuated fashion, antiracist allegiances continued during the Third Reich as “swing youth” imitated African American music and styles as a means of signaling their nonconformity. The African American communist Angela Davis has described her feeling of solidarity with members of the German radical student Left during her postgraduate studies in 1960s Frankfurt. After Davis was arrested in the United States on charges of kidnapping and murder, Germans in the Federal Republic and especially in the German Democratic Republic participated actively in the international campaign to free her. Following her acquittal in 1972, she toured a number of Socialist countries, where her case had become a cause celebre in efforts to expose racism and anticommunism in the United States.
She reported receiving an especially enthusiastic reception in East Germany.Timothy Schroer
See also American Students at German Universities; Davis, Angela Yvonne; GIs in West Germany; Hindenburg Disaster; Olympic Games; U.S. Bases in West Germany
References and Further Reading
Fehrenbach, Heide. “Of German Mothers and ‘Negermischlingskinder’: Race, Sex, and the Postwar Nation.” In The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949—1968. Ed. Hanna Schissler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 164-186.
Lewis, David Levering. W E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.
McBride, David, Leroy Hopkins, and C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay, eds. Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998.
Miller, James A., Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft. “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1934.” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 387-430.